With the recent explosive worldwide growth of Internet connectivity, the use of personal computing devices for electronically transferring money online has increased significantly in recent years. Such transfers are often referred to as online electronic funds transfers (or just “online EFTs”). Online EFTs can be intra- or inter-financial institution. In many inter-financial institution transfers, the financial institutions are located in different countries.
Online EFTs can be facilitated by an online remittance system accessible by personal computing devices over the Internet. Among other operations, the remittance system can require a payer to authenticate him or herself, select a source account from which funds will be withdrawn, specify a monetary amount to transfer, and specify a destination account into which the funds will be deposited. Based on the information provided by the payer, the online remittance system can initiate an online EFT through an automated clearing house or other electronic network for financial transactions, typically for a small fee charged to the payer.
Unfortunately, once the online EFT is initiated, it can be many hours or longer before the online remittance system receives confirmation of disbursement to the payee. A number of factors can affect the disbursement delay including fraud detection, verification of the source account, processing hours of the payment network, and destination financial institution location, hours, and holidays. As a result of this disbursement delay, it is typically not practical for the online remittance system to wait until disbursement to the payee is confirmed before providing confirmation to the payer that the online EFT has been initiated or before providing confirmation to the payer that payment has been processed.
What is needed then is a solution for providing during the disbursement delay guidance to the payer on when payment is expected to be disbursed to the payee. The present invention fulfills this and other needs.